Another recipe from suite101.com. I’ve never made cheesecake before, so I appreciated the hints and tips that came with the recipe. I was really looking forward to trying this out.
The Recipe
This recipe is copyrighted by suit101.com and Donna Diegel, and therefore I am unable to publish its contents on my site.
Please, please, please visit the above link, because it’s a wonderful recipe and deserves to be tried!
Thanks.
My Alterations
Much to my dismay, graham crackers are not available in England, unless I want to get them shipped to my house or something. I made the crust with a mix of crushed shortbread biscuits and nice biscuits. They worked just fine.
Cornstarch is known as corn flower over here, so I guess that doesn’t really count as an alteration, just a point of interest.
My son was helping me mix the batter, and we almost ran into disaster when he dropped the bowl on the kitchen floor; luckily we were only at the stage of whipping up the cream cheese, so it was stiff enough to stay in the bowl even when it was dropped and landed upside-down!
As far as the toppings go, I used the “Whole Strawberry Topping” version, but instead of using 2 cups of jam (!!) I just emptied out the last of the jam I had lurking in the back of my fridge. My cheesecake cracked like crazy, but you can’t really see most of them because I cunningly placed the sliced strawberries over most of the bigger cracks. I poured most of the warm jam on the cake first, so the sliced strawberries stuck in place better.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the recommended spring-form pan, so I had to make do with my circular pyrex casserole dish. It is big, and deep, so I figured it would work just fine. I doubled the recipe for the cracker crust, thinking that I would need more for the dish.
The Results
Well, the first thing I noticed when I poured the batter into the dish was that there was a LOT of cheesecake mixture. From what I can make out in the recipe, it seems like the amounts given would yield an average sized cheesecake, but what I ended up with was a Gigantor Cheesecake. I stuck to the recipe as closely as possible, because I have never made it before and have heard over the years that it is difficult to make, so I wasn’t confident enough to alter it much. I really could have halved the recipe with no difficulty whatsoever. It would have still been a Very Large Cheesecake, but we would have avoided the issue of finding room in the freezer for all the leftovers!
The cheesecake itself tasted marvellous. It was smooth and creamy, sweet but not overly so, and the biscuit base worked well. It was also pretty rich; a small piece is satisfying. Because the cheesecake ended up being Gigantor Cheesecake, we now have many wrapped slices of it in our freezer, ready for packed lunches.
The Verdict
I really enjoyed this cake. It was fun making it, especially since I’ve never done it before, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. If I made this cake again, I would definitely halve the recipe, and possibly invest in a springform pan. I didn’t try to take the cheesecake out of my pyrex casserole dish, and it would be cool to pop a cheesecake out of the pan and present it as it was meant to be seen.
The cake had a lovely flavour and texture, but I think maybe some vanilla pods mixed in there would have given it a little ‘oomph’ and pushed it into WOW territory.
The Rating
4/5
I liked it a lot, but the recipe was a bit confusing and yielded a LOT more cake than I expected.
